Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

In an enlightening article over on GigaOM, Anne Jelenka (whom I subscribe to on her own right) wrote a compelling post about the move from the information age to the connected age.

She sets the stage:

“Today’s version of the web, whatever you want to call it, is notable because people and hardware and information and software and conversation are all mixed together into a hyperconnected network”

And describes very nicely the changes we’re seeing in tools and work styles as our work becomes ever more facilitated by the web. Here’s a table she got from Web Worker Daily (for whom she also blogs - she’s a busy gal!) that nicely sums it up:

She names Microsoft the example of an information age company, and Google the example of the connected age company.

I know a ton of companies who are struggling to be more like Google (I even worked on a project recently where the information age company itself was positioning itself to be more like Google) and there are ramifications beyond giving employees cool perks and time to dream:

If the currency of the connected age is attention (and I’m a firm believer it is…) tools to facilitate aggregation, filtering and retaining attention will be key to productivity and relationships. No longer will RSS readers be enough. Organizations will need to help employees capture, filter and retain essential information wherever, whenever they need it. Attensa has that nailed - with their Enterprise 2.0 RSS ecosystem.

No longer do I need to hunt for information essential to my work. With my RSS subscriptions, the information comes to me. (My burstiness of discontinuous productivity is burstier, as a result.) And no matter whether I’m at my own computer, on the road with only my Blackberry, or even at a friend’s house using their machine, I’m able to get (and manage) my feeds. Once I’ve read a feed and deleted it, it disappears from all of my capture points - and even in that, I’m so much more productive as a result.

And what are these precious feeds?

• Mentions of my clients’ companies or products
• News of competitive companies
• Updates to my favorite news and blog sites (I have a few to add as Anne stays prolific!)

I’m in-touch and smarter as a result. And my company is as well. I’ve got a well-engineered, completely interconnected network tool doing a ton of work for me so I don’t have to.

Think about that kind of perk as you’re striving to be more like Google. Ever-present beer in the kitchen perks pale in comparison to the joy of having an entire hyperconnected network system like Attensa’s enterprise RSS suite watching your back.

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